50-year-old Alan Fletcher has been thinking about his sexy, flirtatious tenth-grade teacher for 35 years. When Patty, the teenager who lives across the hall, encourages him to find Miss Shellagh, Alan develops an awkward friendship with the girl, and finds himself alternately attracted to his 60-year-old former teacher and his 15-year-old neighbor. Meanwhile, Alan has ongoing, secret encounters with the mysterious girl across the courtyard, and the voyeuristic woman who peeps into her window with him. Simultaneously sad and funny, Miss Shellagh's Miniskirt explores the problematic boundaries of human sexuality, which afflicts us too early to be legal and sticks with us too long to be practical.
December 1994 brings the first CIA field assignment for Daisy Parker, ex-stripper, con artist, and borderline lunatic. It is an apparently simple job: carry a package cross-country and allow it to be stolen by the Colombian drug dealer who is after it. But Daisy is not content to be a passive courier. While ceaselessly fighting with her partner, she pinpoints the Colombian and the CIA team following them, makes contact with both, nudges events towards action, and causes random chaos until she discovers the true contents of the package she carries. Then, furious at being played for a patsy, she really gets active. If agents of the CIA were all hapless bunglers (and maybe they are), you might expect their operations to turn out something like Decoys (and maybe they do, more often than we know).
The tale of Daisy Parker spans five decades in the life of the small town of Carlton, Ohio. Starting with her mother's birth amid wartime paternity scandals, nothing in Daisy Parker's conception or execution is normal, so maybe Daisy never stands a chance of being normal herself. Of course, she never particularly tries. Strong-willed, terrified of everything, bold, adventurous, demanding, neurotic, insane – it all depends on who you talk to. As Daisy grows, Carlton grows along with her, but not fast enough for the perpetually dissatisfied child. Grief comes from her exuberantly sexual mother, her earthy, immigrant father, her overly pliant boyfriend, and Loudon Wheeler, the richest man in town, who may or may not be her grandfather. Daisy Parker follows Daisy through comic adventures as a child, teenager, con artist, and virgin stripper. It takes her from infancy to adulthood, from marriage to betrayal, from Ohio to California. And finally it takes her on a long road trip that leads back home again, where she seeks the answers to long-held secrets and discovers ... maybe ... her destiny.
"Like a pack of dynamite blowing away the granite conformity of contemporary fiction,
the stories of Scott Campbell take us into a subterranean landscape that appears newly found
but is as familiar as the half-dreams that twitch us awake after an illuminating drunk.
These coy stories, whether revealing to us a shamelessly rapacious hooker,
or the kind of ex-buddy who ends up the czar of a hardware store in Queens,
ultimately take us far beyond their story lines and into the realm of the truly off-beat,
which then become something agonizingly real,
a feeling that moves from despair to flickering faith to the determination to love again.
Ultimately Campbell's world is one of hope, peopled by brothers and sisters
who discover the truth in a pair of pajamas, down-and-out Manhattanites who show us
what is divinely absurd in a cab-ride from hell or in a street-cart full of Italian ices,
and quirky but pretty girls who decide that yes, they would very much like to screw tonight."
-- Robert Clark Young, author of the novel One Of The Guys
Newly unemployed soap opera actress Adrienne Simpson is having some trouble figuring out who she is ... and who everyone else is as well. She's witnessed a murder from the battlements of an ancient Welsh castle, and when she sees the body up close she finds it disconcertingly reminiscent of herself. In the night she is visited by a ghost, but it's not the murder victim – it's Allison Minor, the character she has played on television for the past four years, whose death scene she came to Wales to film. For years Adrienne has felt the character of Allison has held her back from becoming the person she might be, and now she discovers Allison, freed by her death, has felt the same way about Adrienne. And the next day, leaving Wales with the seductive and mysterious man she met at the murder scene, her luggage is stolen from the train station by Andie Shipley, the woman everybody agrees is dead.
After a wild night with her new lover Earl, who has an uncertain connection with Andie Shipley, Adrienne flees to Manhattan. But Earl follows, Allison reappears, and Andie - dead or alive - takes over Adrienne's apartment and identity in Los Angeles. There is no running from the weirdness that has invaded her life, so Adrienne heads for home to confront the truth, and the corpse, head-on.
Full of thrills, romance, and laughs, Identity Crisis takes us into a world where nothing can possibly be what it seems ... can it?